Video: Arranging panels

Many of Photoshop's commands and features are located in its panels. There are many panels. And I think the best approach for you to take to panels is to think about the ones that you really need at the moment for the task that you're doing and close all of the rest of them so you don't have a bunch of clutter in front of you. Right now, we're looking at the default setup for panels here on the right. As you can see, the panels are arranged in groups. So for example, in the first group here, we've got three panels, and we can cycle among them by just clicking on their tabs in the group.

Photoshop has become an indispensible tool for photographers, designers, and all other creative professionals, as well as students. Photoshop CS4 Essential Training teaches a broad spectrum of core skills that are common to many creative fields: working with layers and selections; adjusting, manipulating, and retouching photos; painting; adding text; automating; preparing files for output; and more. Instructor Jan Kabili demonstrates established techniques as well as those made possible by some of the new features unique to Photoshop CS4. This course is indispensable to those who are new to the application, just learning this version, or expanding their skills. Example files accompany the course.

Arranging panels

Many of Photoshop's commands and features are located in its panels.There are many panels.And I think the best approach for you to take to panels is to think about the onesthat you really need at the moment for the task that you're doing and closeall of the rest of them so you don't have a bunch of clutter in front of you.Right now, we're looking at the default setup for panels here on the right.As you can see, the panels are arranged in groups.So for example, in the first group here, we've got three panels, and we cancycle among them by just clicking on their tabs in the group.

Now let's say we don't need any of these particular panels for the task thatwe're doing. We can close the entire group by going to this icon on theright side of the group.This is the panel menu icon and it's a really important one to know about, yetit's hard for many people to find and every panel group has one.If you click there, you'll find all kinds of commands and items related tothe selected panel.And way at the bottom, you'll find commands to close the entire group or just toclose the selected panel.

I am going to close this entire group.So that's how you close a panel or a panel group.How do you open a panel that's not showing.You go to the Window menu at the top of the screen, and you find the panel you want.I often work, for example, with the History panel open.We'll learn about the History panel in another movie, but basically it keepstrack of all of the actions that you've taken in the order you've taken them.It allows you to go back and fix mistakes.When I open that panel, it appears in a second column here and it is flipped out so that it's ready to use.

If you want to collapse a panel to its column, you can click this double-pointedarrow, and that's a really good thing to do I think, because it gives you moreroom to work, and you have less distracting items on the screen.So sometimes if I have two columns of panels as I do now, I'll just click thedouble-pointed arrows on both to get them out of the way.When you close panels down to their icons, you can either see just the icons,or if you click-and-drag, you can see labels for the icons and those can prove helpful.The other thing you can do with your panels is to join them together so that youhave the most important ones always together and you can move them around the screenand put them wherever you want.

So for example I'm going to open my Layers panel by clicking on its icon here,and I am going to drag it out of its panel group and out of these docked columnsby clicking on its tab and dragging like this.Then I'm going to close the rest of these panels by clicking thedouble-pointed arrow.Now, I am going to get the other panel that's most important to me right now, the History panel.I'll click on it and I'll drag it out of its group and close its group.Now, I am going to join these two panels together by dragging the History panelby its tab and butting it up against the bottom of the Layers panel.

Now they are joined together.And if I click on this top bar here, I can drag and move them anywhere on my screen.I can also collapse them if I want to icons by clicking the double-pointedarrow, just like I can do with the docked columns of panels.A new feature in Photoshop CS4 is the ability to take this entire iconizedcolumn and drag it over to a second monitor so that you can devote your mainmonitor to your document and put all your panels over on a second monitor out of the way.Sometimes you are going to want to get all your panels out of view temporarily.

To do that, hold down the Shift key on your keyboard and press the Tab key andall the panels disappear.To bring them back, you can toggle with the same shortcut, Shift+Tab.So those are some ways to handle the many panels that are available to you in Photoshop.The main idea is to figure out which panels you need at any given time.Close everything else and get the panels that you need arranged in the waythat works best for you.Consider closing all the panels that you don't need and organizing and arrangingthose you do need so that they are most useful for you to accomplish your tasks.

Q: How can artwork be transferred from Photoshop CS4 to Illustrator CS4 without the background?

A: Save the image in Photoshop’s native PSD format. The background in Photoshop must be transparent, meaning there should be no background layer. (To remove a background layer, move your artwork to a separate layer by selecting and copying the content, minus the background, to a new layer, and then delete the background layer. A checkboard pattern behind your image indicates transparent pixels.)

Q: A client has asked for artwork to be delivered as JPEGs or BMP files in 16-bit format. In Photoshop CS4, there does not appear to be an option to save an image as a 16-bit JPEG. Is there a way to save JPEG files as 16-bit in Photoshop?

A: Unfortunately, JPEGs cannot be saved in 16 bit. JPEGs, by nature, are 8-bit. So if you open a high-bit image into Photoshop CS4, you will see no option in any of the save dialog boxes to save the file as a JPEG. You would first have to convert the image to 8 bit (by choosing Image > Mode > 8 bits/channel) and then save it as an 8-bit JPEG. If you open a high-bit image into Photoshop CS5, you will see the option to save it as a JPEG in the Save, Save As, and Save for Web dialog boxes. But the JPEG will not be saved as 16-bit. Instead, Photoshop will downsample it to 8-bit for you before saving it as JPEG.

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